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Since 9/11, the fire service has experienced a shift and an expansion in the nature of threats and hazards that it faces. Despite advances in the field, firefighters are still losing their lives inside of burning buildings, and they must find new ways of identifying training gaps and improving current training practices. This thesis explores whether emergency incidents connected to low frequency and high risk events contain sufficient warning signs or indicators of imminent catastrophic events, if firefighters could identify them, and if there was a potential of changing decision making and averting a tragedy. In order to create a firm basis for this discovery, this research effort included a detailed analysis of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health’s line of duty death reports from the years 2013–2015. The work provided an opportunity to learn from past events and practices and identify successes and failures in the firefighting domain without the bias of being closely involved with the cases or having a specific agenda. Quantitative analysis performed on this data set and the knowledge gleaned from looking at the events after the fact provide a foundation for advising novel training approaches and scenarios that can be used to train both individuals and teams of fire fighters.

We describe recent results in the development of methodology of the statistical analysis of univariate series of events (point processes) and give some references to applications in the analysis and evaluation of computer ...

The previously developed guidance law implemented onboard the Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (SUAV) relies exclusively on the information from the image processing software and allows the performance of coordinated SUAV ...

Political analysis must keep pace with rapidly changing,
ever more complex international relations. This thesis suggests
that a systematic study of the nuclear energy issue is one logical
choice for comprehensive international ...